Obituary: Joep Lange

IT IS not true martyrdom to be killed in the crossfire of someone else’s war. But Joep Lange should still be seen as a martyr, for he would not have died when he did had he not been pursuing a war of his own—a war far deadlier than the skirmishing in eastern Ukraine which brought down the aircraft in which he was flying.His enemy, which has taken more lives than any armed conflict since the second world war, was the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV. The disease it causes, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS, has killed 39m people since it was recognised in 1981, and continues to kill about 1.5m people a year. But that grim toll has fallen sharply from a peak of 2.4m a decade ago. No soldier wins a war by himself. But Dr Lange’s contribution was bigger than most.He died en route to Melbourne, where the International AIDS Society’s biennial meeting was about to be held. A former president of the IAS, he had been in the fight almost since the start. He qualified as a doctor in 1981, just before AIDS transformed infectious diseases from a backwater eschewed by ambitious researchers into a crucial and urgent field. He and his team published vital papers on the...



from The Economist: Obituary http://ift.tt/1AbbJOc